Fiche - Joyce Carol OATES, Black Water (1992)

1. Introduction: Joyce Carol Oates and Black Water

2. Oates’s inspiration for Black Water: a car accident in 1969
3. The American political background in Black Water
4. Time: fragmentation and flashbacks
5. Narrative, typographic and syntactic fragmentation
6. Repetition: entrapment and revelation
7. An ominous portrait of the senator
8. Kelly Kelleher, an American girl

1. Introduction: Joyce Carol Oates and Black Water

Black Water, published in 1992, is an uncommon book just as Joyce Carol
Oates is an uncommon writer. She was born in Lockport, NY, in 1938 and is,
therefore, a contemporary American author, who taught creative writing at Princeton
University for years. Especially, she is a prolific writer—she has written dozens of
books, including novels (around 60 according to some), short story collections,
innumerable essays, young adult fiction, poetry, plays and a memoir, A Widow’s
Story, published in 2011, after the death of her first husband. She won the National
Book Award in 1969 for her novel them, and scores of other awards during her career
including the Prix Femina Etranger for a novel called Les Chutes (The Falls, 2004) in
2005. In 1996, Oates received the PEN/Malamud Award for “a lifetime of literary
achievement.” What is also specific to Oates is her relish for mystery, fear, even
horror and terror at times, anxiety and dislocation—hence her predilection for
fragmented narratives, the grotesque mode and the gothic genre. Her stories often
involve women, but not only, including an occasional woman or child murderer—I
refer you to a short story collection entitled The Female of the Species, published in
2006, for instance.
In 1980, Oates published a short essay entitled “Why Is Your Writing So
Violent,” a question she was often asked everywhere in the world, when giving
lectures. In the essay, she answers the questions as follows: “the question is always
insulting. The question is always ignorant. The question is always sexist […] Would
you ask that question of a male writer?” And she adds that “[her] writing isn’t
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explicitly violent, but deals, most of the time, with the phenomenon of violence and
its aftermath, in ways not unlike the Greek dramatists.” Then she continues: “writing
is language and, in a very important sense is more ‘about’ language than ‘about’ a
subject.” In an interview Oates added: “I write about the victims of violence […] and
yet my critics say I’m writing about violence. From my point of view, I’ve always been
writing about its aftermath.”
Another of Oates’s essays, published in 1998 and entitled “The Aesthetics of
Fear,” begins with: “Why should we wish to experience fear? What is the mysterious
appeal, in the structured coherences of art, of such dissolving emotions as anxiety,
dislocation, terror?” (Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going 26). And she continues:
“what is the ‘aesthetic of fear’ but the vehicle by which fear (of mortality, oblivion) is
obviated? At least temporarily” (ibid. 29). Oates, therefore, creates artistic fear to
help her readers, as humans, cope with the basic fear resulting from their mortality.
Hence, she concludes the essay as follows: “The aesthetics of fear is the aesthetics of
our common humanity” (ibid. 35). However, humanity for Oates has mostly meant
Americans because she only writes about America. In an article entitled “Murder She
Wrote” (2006), Henry Louis Gates writes: “a future archaeologist equipped only with
her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America” (1). While Oates
especially focuses on the dark side of life in America, she is particularly concerned
with the condition of women: “I might be just as apt to write about a young man, or
even an older man,” she said in an interview. “But probably, statistically speaking, it
has been the case that women and girls are the most vulnerable, so I have obviously
written about them” (Kowal 33).
Black Water is a good illustration of Oates’s concerns. And if it is uncommon
(as said earlier), it is first because it is hardly a novel, merely a 154-page novella, and
next because it deals with a young woman’s last moments, last thoughts, before
death. As Sharon Oard Warner writes in an article entitled “The Fairest in the Land:
Blonde and Black Water, the Nonfiction Novels of Joyce Carol Oates” (2006): “[Black
Water] is designed to be read in the length of time it takes the heroine to die by
suffocation” (514). Blonde, another novel written by Joyce Carol Oates and published
in 2000, is often paralleled with Black Water—though it is far longer—because both
books deal with real events, hence the word “nonfiction” used by Oard Warner.
A nonfiction novel is a story of actual people and actual events told with the
dramatic techniques of a novel. The American writer Truman Capote claimed to have
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invented this genre with his book In Cold Blood (1965). A true story of the brutal
murder of a Kansas farm family, the book was based on six years of exacting research
and interviews with neighbors and friends of the victims, and the two captured
murderers. The story is told from the points of view of different “characters,” and the
author attempts not to intrude his own comments or distort facts.
Blonde is Oates’s version of the life and death of Norma Jean Baker—alias
Marylin Monroe—whereas Black Water is concerned with a car accident involving
U. S. Senator Edward (alias Ted) Kennedy that took place in 1969 at Chappaquiddick
and took the life of a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne.

2. Oates’s inspiration for Black Water: a car accident in 1969

On the evening of July 18, 1969, while most Americans were home watching
television reports on the progress of the Apollo lunar landing mission, Ted Kennedy
and one of his cousins were hosting a party at a rented cottage on Chappaquiddick
Island, an affluent island near Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. The party was
planned as a reunion for veterans of the late Senator Robert Kennedy’s 1968
presidential campaign—Bob Kennedy was a younger brother of John Fitzgerald
Kennedy, the American president who was murdered in Dallas in 1963. Bobby
Kennedy was Ted Kennedy’s older brother, and following Bobby’s assassination in
June 1968, Ted took up his family’s political torch. In 1969, Ted Kennedy was elected
majority whip for the Democratic Party in the U. S. Senate (the party whip is a party
manager in a legislative body who secures attendance for voting and directs other
members) and he seemed an early front-runner for the 1972 Democratic presidential
nomination. Just after 11 p.m. on July 18, Kennedy left the party with Mary Jo
Kopechne, by his account to drive to the ferry slip where they would catch a boat back
to their respective lodgings in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard. While driving down
the main roadway, Kennedy took a sharp turn onto the unpaved Dike Road, drove for
a short distance, and then missed the ramp to a narrow wooden bridge and drove into
a pond. Kennedy, a married man, claimed the Dike Road excursion was a wrong turn.
However, it is well established that both he and Kopechne had previously driven
down the same road, which led to a secluded beach just beyond the bridge. In
addition, Kopechne had left both her purse and room key at the party, so she did not
intend to go to her own hotel room. Kennedy escaped the car and then dove down in
an attempt to retrieve Kopechne from the sunken Oldsmobile. Failing, he stumbled
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back to the cottage, where he enlisted a couple of friends in a second attempt to save
Kopechne. The three men were unsuccessful; her body was not recovered. Kennedy
then swam back to Edgartown, about a mile away. He returned to his room at a local
hotel, changed his clothes, and at 2:25 a.m. stepped out of his room when he spotted
the innkeeper. Kennedy told the innkeeper that he had been awakened by noise next
door and asked what time it was. He then returned to his room. Was Kennedy trying
to establish an alibi? Whatever Kennedy’s intentions, it is only at 9:45 a.m., that is, 10
hours after driving off Dike Road bridge, that he reported the accident to the police
and admitted that he was the driver. On July 25, Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving
the scene of an accident, received a two-month suspended sentence, and had his
driving license suspended for a year. That evening, in a televised statement, he called
the delayed reporting of the accident “indefensible” but denied that he had been
involved in any improprieties with Kopechne. He also asked his constituents to help
him decide whether to continue his political career. Receiving a positive response, he
resumed his senatorial duties at the end of a month. There is speculation that he used
his considerable influence to avoid more serious charges that could have resulted
from the episode. Although the incident on Chappaquiddick Island helped to
derail his presidential hopes, Kennedy continued to serve as U. S. senator of
Massachusetts until his death in 2009.
In an interview with Ramona Kowal, published in a book entitled Speaking
Volumes (2010)—which gathers interviews of famous writers including Toni
Morrison, Norman Mailer and Mario Vargas Llosa, to name only a few—Oates
explains the reasons why she wrote about this episode: “All the headlines and all the
stories were about Ted Kennedy. Will he run for office now or won’t he? (…) So I
wanted to tell the story of somebody who was a victim. I didn’t write about Mary Jo
Kopechne, who would not have interested me very much. (…) I wrote about a girl who
is a little more like my students at Princeton: very intelligent, very idealistic. (…) And
so Kelly Kelleher in that novella is still an idealist—and it’s because of her idealism
that she falls under the sway of this Democratic liberal, which was what Ted Kennedy
was also. So they are all the reasons why I wrote about that” (Kowal 42-43).
After the book was published, the New York Times wrote a harsh review saying
that “this genre [that is, fact and fiction] evades the responsibilities of both history
and fiction. While it trades on the news value of a story, it obeys none of the rules of
journalism. While it exploits the liberties of fiction, it demands little exercise of the
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imagination.” In an interview following the publication of the book, Oates responded

to the criticism saying: “I would have thought the entire book was an act of the
imagination.” In other words, Oates insists on fiction and imagination, far more than
on facts and history. Yet, and no matter how short the book, the referential,
particularly the political, background is important, even plays a key role.

3. The referential background in Black Water

The novel is set in a different place than Chappaquiddick, Grayling Island off
the coast of Maine, “a twenty-minute ferry ride from Boothbay Harbor” (5), and at a
different time, July 4, i.e. Independence Day, a day of celebration ironically in
America (see page 136), which may be the reason why Oates set the accident and the
death of Kelly Kelleher on that particular day. However, as early as page 4, the
fireworks are compared with “the TV war in the Persian Gulf,” as if somehow setting
the stage for Kelly’s death. While the year is not clearly mentioned, the allusions to
the Gulf War (4, 100) suggest that the accident in Oates’s novella takes place between
the summer of 1990—when the Gulf War began—and 1992, when the book was
released, that is, in all likelihood, July 1991.
Apart from the car accident in the opening section, not much happens in the
book. However, the drowning is structurally and politically the central point from
which a whole world of personal and political drama both spreads—like the ripples
around the submerging car—and comes meaningfully together. Thus, the American
political background is repeatedly mentioned, anchoring the narrative in a strong
referential background—America in the early nineties :
- Pages 25, 26 and 42 : the Democratic defeat in 1988, when George Bush (the
father)—who was Ronald Reagan’s Vice President—won the Presidential election over
Michael Dukakis, the Democratic governor of Massachusetts. Ted Kennedy did not
run for the Democratic nomination (as said on pages 25 and 106)—but Jesse Jackson,
Al Gore and Gary Hart, among the most famous, did—and Dukakis ultimately won
the nomination. His running mate was Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen (mentioned on
page 106). On page 42, the narrator adopts Kelly’s viewpoint to criticize the
Republican George Bush. Bush’s election campaign against Dukakis was extremely
negative and some commentators later called the 1988 presidential campaign “the
dirtiest in history,” thus suggesting a clear degradation in American political life.
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- Page 29 : the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in June 1968 which reminds

the reader of a particularly positive period for the Democratic party when the
Kennedys were in power and major reforms were implemented. It is also a means to
suggest that Kelly Kelleher was born around 1964. By contrast the Republican
Hamlin Hunt (40-41), a so-called friend of Kelly’s father’s, is fictional, thus showing
that Oates is not interested in the Republicans. Kelly’s boss, Carl Spader (52) is also a
fictional character.
- Page 53 : the “Kennedy-Johnson vision” refers to the heyday of democratic
leadership when Robert Kennedy then Lyndon Johnson, his vice-president, were in
power from 1961 to 1969 (Kennedy 1961-1963) and Johnson (1963-1964 and 1964-
1969). In 1969 Republican Richard Nixon came into office. During this democratic
period, major civil laws were voted: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the first effective
civil rights law since Reconstruction, outlawing segregation and discrimination
throughout American society.
- Page 82 : “the outrage of the recent Supreme Court decisions” refers to seven
decisions by the Supreme Court, between 1989 et 1991, some of which were regarded
as changing the landscape of discrimination law and limiting The Civil Rights Act of
1964. Congress, therefore, enacted The Civil Rights Act of 1991.
- Page 83 : Justice Thurgood Marshall was the first African-American Justice
of the Supreme Court and he was instrumental in ending legal segregation. He was
sworn in by Lyndon Johnson in 1967 and retired in 1991.
-page 107: an allusion to Adlai Stevenson, the leading Democratic figure in the
fifties. He won the democratic nomination for the Presidential election in 1952 and
1956, but was defeated both times by Dwight Eisenhower, hence the “Eisenhower
phenomenon” that is mentioned on page 107.
- Page 108 : “The Supreme Court, abortion—” In the 1960s, inspired by the
civil rights and antiwar movements, women began to fight more actively for their
rights. They marched and rallied and lobbied for abortion on demand. Civil liberties
groups joined in these efforts to support women. On January 22, 1973, the U.S.
Supreme Court legalized abortion in the famous Roe v. Wade decision. Though Roe v.
Wade left a lot of power to doctors and government, it was an important victory for
women. After this legalization, the antiabortion forces began a serious mobilization
using a variety of political tactics including political lobbying, campaigning, public
relations, and picketing abortion clinics. The long-range goal of the antiabortion
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movement is to outlaw abortion. Their short-range strategy has been to attack access
to abortion, and they have had successes. The antiabortion movement’s first victory
came in July 1976, when Congress passed the Hyde Amendment banning Medicaid
funding for abortion unless a woman’s life was in danger. Antiabortion forces have
also used illegal and increasingly violent tactics, including harassment, terrorism,
violence, and murder. Since the early 1980s, clinics and providers have been targets
of violence. When the Supreme Court upheld the Hyde Amendment, it began eroding
the constitutional protection for abortion rights. Since then, there have been other
severe blows. In Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), the Court opened
the door to new state restrictions on abortion. In Hodgson v. Minnesota (1990), the
Court upheld one of the strictest parental notification laws in the country. Many
states since then have passed similar restrictions, which have the effect of limiting
access to abortion, especially for women with low incomes, teenage women, and
women of color. Kelly’s allusion, therefore, emphasizes the contrast between the
sixties when the Democrats—particularly the Kennedys—were in power and civil
liberties were granted both blacks and women, and the late eighties/early nineties
when the Republicans in office limited these rights.
- Page 122 : Buffy says to Kelly: “‘don’t forget, he voted aid to the Contras.’”
This is an allusion to a scandal that broke out in the eighties when it was revealed that
America helped the Contras—that is the counterrevolutionary forces—against the
communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, whereas Congress had officially cut off funds
for the Contras. In the summer of 1986, however, Congress passed a provision
allocating $100 million of their own budget in aid to the Contras, i.e. to fight against
communism in Latin America. The scandal was evidence of the American
involvement in this part of the world.
Eventually, the paratext includes a page entitled “Acknowledgements” (156) in
which Oates mentions two articles on capital punishment that she quotes from in
section 30 (127-130), a section that mostly borrows from Kelly’s “article on capital
punishment,” published in Citizen’s Inquiry—a fictional newspaper as well—
mentioned on page 105. However, only the quotation marks at the beginning of the
section and in the middle of page 130 help the reader understand that the passage is
actually an external quotation graphically describing the different means used to kill
criminals in 20th century America. A detail is worthy of attention in this extended
quotation: the passages in italics represent comments by supporters of the death
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penalty, that is, mostly Republicans like Kelly’s father (I refer you to the bottom of
page 130).
By contrast, Mario Cuomo (on page 131), New York Democratic Governor from
1983 till 1994, was a diehard opponent of capital punishment. The whole passage,
therefore, casts an ironic light on the situation of the young woman doomed to die in
the most brutal circumstances while she has committed no crime. And it is all the
more ironic since the Senator is said to be “on record” (131), that is, officially,
opposed to the death penalty. Yet, Oates suggests that he is actually the one who
condemns Kelly to die—hence the gap between his official principles and his deeds.
No matter how short and eventless the book, therefore, the referential
framework, particularly the political background, plays a major role. The updating in
the novel reflects the fact that the political rot and the loss of the Democratic vision
that had set in at the time of the real-life incident, and of which the whole book is
symbolic, was deeper and more evident by the time in which the novella is set and
was published. Oates contrasts the early sixties, a period of hope and increasing social
justice, and the early nineties, when political and moral decadence prevailed in
America. For instance, while Ted Kennedy when he had his accident in the sixties was
driving an Oldsmobile—that is a typically American brand of cars produced by
General Motor—The Senator in the novel is driving a Toyota, i.e. a Japanese car, and
it is repeatedly mentioned as if to emphasize America’s economic decadence as well.
This confrontation between early sixties and early nineties America goes hand in
hand with a highly dramatic treatment of time.

4. Time: fragmentation and flashbacks

As said earlier, the book is unusually short since it focuses on the last moments
of Kelly Kelleher’s life, as she is trapped in a car filling up with water—from the
accident to her death. As far as time is concerned, the narrative is first a tragically
forward-moving work, even if the outcome is known as early as the first section—
Oates drawing inspiration from a real episode. Thereby, the novel adopts a structure
based on hindsight, a re-creation or recollection of the past, and its primary interest
is not in what happens but in unpicking the sexual and political power structures that
have led to a situation that is already in place when the novel begins. A major
temporal tension, therefore, lies at the heart of the book—between physical
entrapment, on the one hand, and mental expansion, on the other, through the
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recurrent, nearly systematic, use of flashbacks, or analepses: from the recent past (the
hurried drive to the ferry in the dark on a disused road, the party beforehand and
Kelly’s the meeting with The Senator) to Kelly’s personal history (her political
commitment and passionate campaigning, a painful and potentially abusive sexual
relationship, a childhood that seems to have left her with low self-esteem and The
Senator’s political background). As Tanya Tromble writes in an article entitled
“Fiction in Fact and Fact in Fiction in the Writing of Joyce Carol Oates:” “frequent
recourse to analepsis is a prominent characteristic of Oates’s fiction which oftentimes
more resembles an intermingled collage of life-scenes than a fluid stream of story
with definite starting and ending points” (6). And this is precisely what we have in
Black Water, “a collage” of different topics, voices, places and periods—all the more
as the narrative also includes an occasional prolepsis or flash forward: page 4, for
example, “Later. . . there would be,” and page 37: “what the future may have brought
(in contrast to what the events of that night did in fact bring) will forever remain
unknowable”—and this “collage” is even more dramatic perhaps than in any other of
Oates’s novels because of the emergency situation experienced by Kelly Kelleher.
While her body is drowning in black water, her mind is flooded by incoherent
memories of all kinds.
After the accident in section 1 (I will not talk of “chapters” considering how
short they tend to be, but “sequence” could be an appropriate word as well), Oates
immediately moves on to the moment before the accident and the circumstances of
the accident in section 2 (page 4), then to the condom—“she’d been carrying in her
purse for, how long” (top of page 5)—which suggests the reason for the car drive, i.e.
Kelly’s attraction to The Senator. As Kelly is literally plunged into an unfamiliar
environment, the readers also find themselves in indefinite time—“she’d had it so
long,” “in these many months” (page 5)—and, therefore, go through a similar
experience of defamiliarization, provoking a loss of references—hence the paragraph
concludes on “there were no words,” which refers both to Kelly and the readers, and
is somehow confirmed by “somewhere” in the opening lines of the next paragraph.
After this plunge into an unknown past, the readers return to the recent past—that is
the car drive before the accident in the next paragraph and down to the end of the
second section. In section 3, the readers brutally find themselves at another moment,
that is, before the car drive when Kelly is leaving her friend Buffy’s home. The
beginning of section 4 returns to the moment before the accident (pages 8 and 9),
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that is, the car drive, which is brutally interrupted by an allusion to Kelly’s age, as the
drive is brutally interrupted by the accident.
Throughout the narrative, flashbacks allow the reader to come to know the
victim, Kelly Kelleher, her life and family, her political commitment, thereby
progressively suggesting why she found herself in such terrible circumstances.
Flashbacks also enable the reader to learn about The Senator and the American
political background in the late sixties and late eighties. In other words, analepses
play a key role as far as characterization and contextualization are concerned,
provided that the readers piece together the different fragments of this narrative-
jigsawpuzzle.
However, analepses also play another important role—as they constantly
interrupt the narrative, they force the readers to go though a somewhat similar
experience to Kelly, that is, disorientation, a disturbing loss of references and a sense
of chaos. A significant example can be seen in the second half of page 9, when the 3 rd
person narrative unexpectedly shifts to the conditional and the second person, “you
would/you would not,” which precisely emphasizes that Kelly’s experience baffles all
expectations. And this is repeated in the following paragraph: “for the Fourth of July
on Grayling Island at Buffy St John’s parents’ place had been celebratory and careless
and marked by a good deal of laughter and spirited conversation and innocent excited
anticipation of the future (…), //thus it was virtually impossible to comprehend how
its tone might change so abruptly.” While the polysyndetons and the alliterations
(fricatives) in the first part of the sentence—dealing with the party—suggest lightness,
fluidity and harmony, the last part (referring to the accident) is significantly shorter
and sounds more brutal, by contrast, due to the plosives (t, p, k, b, d). In the last part
of the section, the narrative shifts both to the indefinite past and to the iterative mode
—“several times in her life,” “each time,” “and each time”—thus creating another
effect of disorientation in the reader, which perfectly mirrors both Kelly’s own
experience (“she had had no coherent perception of what in fact was happening”
[10]) and the narrator’s comment (“For at such moments time accelerates. Near the
point of impact, time accelerates to the speed of light./Patches of amnesia like white
paint spilling into her brain” [10]). Throughout the narrative, Oates uses language
mimetically—in other words, it is not just meant to give a representation of Kelly’s
experience but to reproduce it linguistically for the readers to experience. The section
ends on an elliptic (or verbless) sentence and a provocative image/comparison: each
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traumatic episode experienced by the body baffles the brain and is beyond reach of
perception, hence “these patches of amnesia” like paint whitening the brain or blanks
on the page—disorientation, therefore, both for the character going through the
experience and for the readers reading about it. Section 5 briefly returns to the
accident but section 6 unexpectedly opens with Kelly’s past as a brilliant student at
Brown University—“five years ago” (13); however, the allusion to her thesis makes
the link with The Senator—his political career as she related it in her work (at the
bottom of page 12). Yet, on page 13, the narrative returns to the recent past (“that
afternoon”) and Kelly’s meeting with The Senator, before shifting again to July 3 rd
(“the night before”), that is the night before the meeting, when Kelly and a couple of
friends read the horoscope column in Glamour. This horoscope, suggesting a
“romantic” future, appears all the more ironic in the light of the accident. It leads to
Kelly’s relationship with her parents and then, unexpectedly, to a return to the
present and her skin problems, hence the question of beauty and the allusion to a love
affair (and a mysterious lover) in an unspecified past, underlined by the shift to the
pluperfect—“when her lover had loved her.” The section ends on an anaphoric “she
would/she would not,” in which “would” is not just a conditional but also the ironic
sign of Kelly’s intention, as if she had learnt from her past failed love affair and meant
to act differently now—but this is dramatic irony since the reader is aware that this is
not true.
From this brief analysis of the first six sections, it appears that the narrative
consists of a wide range of disjointed scenes, memories and observations without any
sense of temporal or topical ordering for them. These fragments are interspersed with
both the delusive imaginings of the protagonist—about her affair with The Senator
and, even more ironically later, about being rescued by him, hence the recurrent use
of the conditional (p 69, for instance: “He was gone but would come back”)—and
“real-time” snatches delineating the physical horror of the car accident and drowning.
This entanglement is evident, for instance, on page 152:

She’d never loved any man, she was a good girl but she would love that man if
that would save her.
The black water was splashing into her mouth, into her nostrils, there was no
avoiding it, filling her lungs, and her heart was beating in quick erratic
lurches laboring to supply oxygen to her fainting brain where she saw so
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vividly jagged needles rising like stalagmites—what did it mean? Laughing

ruefully to think how many kisses she’d had tasting of beer? Wine? Whiskey?
Cigarettes? Marijuana?
You love the life you’ve lived, there is no other.
You love the life you’ve lived, you’re an American girl. You believe you have
chosen it.
And yet he was diving into the black water, diving into the car, his fingers
outspread on the cracked windshield and his hair lifting in tendrils, Kelly?—
Kelly?

Here, descriptions of the material experience of “black water” invading the

protagonist’s lungs are juxtaposed against her fantasy of being rescued by The
Senator and conferring her love on him as well as her rueful (=pitiable) consideration
of the hollowness of “American Dream” platitudes and the intoxicated kisses of
strangers.
Fragmentation, as far as time and topics are concerned, is no doubt a powerful
means of rendering Kelly’s panic in the car, and therefore her apparent lack of
coherent thinking. On the other hand, a closer examination reveals a form of
coherence, at least in the early sections—one subject leading to another in Kelly’s
mind, for instance in section 6. Coherence and continuity in the book rely on Kelly
being the major consciousness in the narrative. However, in the second part of the
novella, the sections become increasingly chaotic and fragmented. Section 21 is a
good example as it falls into 5 incoherent subsections: the first consists in a definition
of acne including the major treatments for it standing out in capital letters. All the
passage could well come from a medical dictionary or from the “Instructions for use”
of a medicine or cosmetic against acne. This is actually an allusion to section 6 (p 14),
where Kelly’s skin problems are first mentioned. This opening subsection is followed
by a couple of sentence fragments in italics suggesting Kelly’s thoughts, then The
Senator’s—as they are imagined by Kelly—during the party at Buffy’s. The next
subsection in normal font is a description of Kelly’s swimsuit and of her tunic that
could well come from a fashion magazine—hence the absence of verbs and articles—
but the last sentence (paragraph 1) “so you will want to be golden tan ALL OVER” and
the last adjective “SEXY” (paragraph 2, in capital letters) are likely to come from
Kelly herself—with capital letters to signal the change. The next subsection consists in
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an apparently disjointed list of 4 warnings, underlined by the anaphoric “CAUTION”

in capital letters. However, all these warnings are related to beauty (how to take care
of oneself) and sex (the reference to AIDS victims) and, thereby, implicitly relate to
Kelly’s affair with The Senator—at least as she dreams about it—but while Kelly is
concerned about details, ironically, she does not perceive that it is The Senator
himself she should be careful about. Eventually, the last subsection refers to Scorpio,
Kelly’s zodiac sign, whose ruling planet is Pluto—hence the allusion to Roman
mythology in which, ironically, Pluto is the god of the underworld (in Greek
mythology, he was called Hades) and, therefore, of death. However, Proserpina (or
Persephone in Greek mythology) is considered by some to have been “Queen of the
Underworld” long before there was a masculine Pluto—hence the allusion to “a
masculinized goddess”—whereas the classical myth actually says that she was
abducted by the god of the underworld to become his queen, this abduction being a
metaphor of patriarchy’s conquest. No matter what, this passage is a reference to
section 6, in which Kelly’s zodiac sign is first mentioned. The last sentence, however,
may simply come from a horoscope, an ironic allusion to Kelly’s—and many women’s
—romantic illusions and ingenuousness. The whole section, therefore, baffles both
time and logic, and the topical fragmentation is enhanced throughout by narrative,
syntactic and typographic variations, a recurrent characteristic not just of Black
Water but also of Oates’s fiction in general.

5. Narrative, typographic and syntactic fragmentation

In his autobiography, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, the French critic
justifies his taste for fragments in the Gidian manner: “because incoherence is
preferable to a distorting order” (93). In Black Water, an incoherent or disjointed
narrative is no doubt the best means of reproducing Kelly’s bemusing experience.
Barthes also associates the fragment with music, and it is true that the fragmentation
of Oates’s novella suggests as many waves of black water spilling into the vehicle. It is
only by piecing the fragments together that the readers can better understand whom
Kelly is and how she came to find herself in such a tragic situation. The fragments can
be considered to be as many hints or clues allowing for suspense to develop—even
though the denouement makes no doubt—and for the readers to be fully involved in
the narrative.
 14

The very structure of the novella exhibits fragmentation. Not only does it begin
in medias res but it falls into two parts and 32 untitled sections—some of them only a
paragraph long (section 1, section 3, section 5), others hardly a page long (sections 10
& 24). The first part—sections 1 to 15—mostly refers to the accident and Kelly’s
meeting with The Senator. It ends on a climactic revelation as the accident is fully
described for the first time in section 15 (even if it recurs as a leitmotiv throughout
the first part and in section 19)—not only did The Senator provoke the accident but,
instead of helping Kelly, he “shoved her away” (64) and left her trapped in the car.
The second part—from section 16 to section 32—is concerned with Kelly trapped in
the car, thinking about The Senator and politics, the party at Buffy’s and her
childhood. While the revelation in section 15 could have resulted in Kelly’s
enlightenment, the loss of her illusions as to The Senator’s real nature, in fact it
brings about more illusions, but of a different kind, as suggested by the opening
words of section 16: “He was gone but would come back to save her” (69). And
dramatic irony in this second part makes Kelly’s plight even more unbearable to the
readers. Interestingly, section 15 and 16 are rare sections in the narrative that directly
follow from each other, without any topical or temporal break between the two.
Narrative fragmentation, however, is emphasized both by the different voices
involved in the narrative and by the typographic variations these voices are often
associated with—Kelly’s hopeful statement on the first line of section 16, for instance,
is in capital letters but the introduction of italics is no doubt the major typographic
variation in the novel. For Tania Tromble, a specialist in Oates’s works,

this technique of typographically rendering certain passages in italics to set

them apart, indicating their difference from the narrative in which they are
embedded, allows the reader access to two levels of meaning in relation to the
characters: both the exterior and interior realms. The effect created by this
technique is of a disjointed narrative struggling to render a multi-layered reality.
Italicized interruptions indicate rupture while at the same time pointing to
continuity, betraying the instability of the present while offering a glimpse of the
complex space/time relationships that make up lived experience. The
differences in font indicate to the reader the passage between types of
information with different psychological ramifications, the coexistence of
objective and subjective realms. (7)
 15

Tromble also writes about others books by Oates but her remarks are also relevant to
Black Water: “rarely do more than two or three pages go by without the flow of the
text being broken by an italicized passage which is often meant to represent an

interruption surging up into the text from another dimension” (7). In the case of
Black Water, Oates definitely renders a “multi-layered reality”—on the one hand,
Kelly trapped in the car, that is, the present and her tragic situation, and on the other
hand, her rambling thoughts about the past—be it recent or distant, personal or
historical. The differences in font also indicate to the reader “different types of
information” and “the coexistence of objective and subjective realms”—her
entrapment in the car and her romantic illusions about The Senator. In other words,
the narrative juxtaposes several dimensions—both temporal and spatial, objective
and subjective—and they are underlined by the use of different fonts.
In addition, while Oates uses a third person narrator, the narrative is
interspersed with Kelly’s voice in italics, speaking in direct speech and in the first
person, as in a long broken monologue running throughout the book. The first section
is a good example: first, a long sentence describing the accident like a movie camera,
then Kelly’s words in italics asking for help, and the contrast between the two is
underlined not just by the difference in font but also by the sound effects and the
rhythm (a long sentence with brutal alliterations and negative forms in the
description, assonance and fragmentation—the dash—in Kelly’s words). The second
section also ends on Kelly’s desperate “Am I going to die—like this?” (3, 6), which is
repeated on pages 48 and 64. Kelly’s first person is highly recurrent in the novel: page
9 “Not now. Not like this.”/“Not like this. No.”; page 55 “Am I ready?”; page 69 “I’m
here. Here”; page 75 “He will be back to help me of course.”; page 76 “Help, help me!
—here.”; page 92 “Help me. Don’t forget me. I’m here.”; page 96 “Here. I’m here.” On
page 88, capital letters add emphasis and thus make the call even more desperate and
tragic. “Here, I’m here”—also repeated on pages 102, 123, 124—is all the more
heartbreaking as it underlines Kelly’s vain hopes and her blindness to The Senator’s
morality, or lack of it. However, page 124 is the last occurrence of the short phrase,
afterwards it disappears as if to suggest that Kelly no longer expects any rescue, is
giving up hope and only trying to prepare herself for death—hence the repetition of
“AM I READY” (in capital letters on page 132), which becomes “You are ready”
(repeated twice on page 135), as if Kelly were now dramatically trying to convince
 16

herself—but this second person also involves the reader who is turned into a
powerless voyeur—and is therefore all the more gripping. Kelly’s voice is hardly
present in the last pages except for “What can I do! What can I do! God instruct me
what can I do! (on page 144), which sounds like a question but is significantly
followed by exclamation marks—as if to suggest that there is actually nothing to do
and she knows it, hence her appeal to God. It is the first time that Kelly has appealed
God—on p 73, by contrast, she noted that she was not a believer: “nor did she believe
in the Anglican God.” This appeal, therefore, is all the more pathetic, a sign that she is
increasingly desperate. She no longer calls for help from humans but appeals to God’s
mercy as a last resort (page 146 “If YOU would have mercy now”—note the
capitalized “YOU” here). When she dies, ironically, she is still denying death and
trying to convince herself that she is alive: “If I can see it, I am still alive” (page 153)-
—however the verb “died” significantly concludes the section and the whole book.
Kelly’s voice in the first person, therefore, allows the reader to get as close as possible
to experiencing the girl’s tragic last moments firsthand, and the evolution of her
words is highly dramatic, since she seems to get more and more desperate, closer and
closer to a certain death.
However, Kelly’s voice in italics can refer to other subjects than her
entrapment:
- page 39: she describes her meeting with The Senator and The Senator himself
(page 83, page 90, page 126);
- page 99: she talks to her former lover G—, to The Senator himself (page 115),
to her parents (page 118, page 119, page 120), to her whole family (page 151);
- pages 133, 134, 135, 149: she talks to herself;
Italic passages can also represent Kelly’s thoughts about different temporal
episodes:
-about the present—as she is trapped in the car (page 84, page 93, page 94,
page 98, page 99, page 112);
-about the recent past—as she is with The Senator (page 86, page 91, page 109,
page 117) or with her friend Buffy (page 115);
-about the distant past, when she was a schoolgirl, and one of her friends, Lisa,
attempted suicide (pages 111 & 113).
On page 43, however, Kelly’s voice speaking to her mother in the first person is
not italicized. The narrative, therefore, is mimetically as unstable and bemusing as
 17

Kelly’s experience. In addition, not all italic passages represent Kelly’s voice, other
voices, too, are introduced throughout the book by means of italics:
- page 13: a horoscope for Scorpio from Glamour, which represents the voice
of illusion;
-page 16: Kelly’s parents’ words;
-page 23: Kelly’s father’s voice “I can’t control;”
-page 26: the voice of public opinion “A man in the prime of his career”
-page 29: Carl Spader (Kelly’s boss)’s saying about politics; his quotation of de
Gaulle (page 137)
-page 38, page 72: the guests’ voices at Buffy’s, “It’s him—Jesus, is it really
him?”
-page 45: G— (Kelly’s former lover)’s voice “you know you’re somebody’s little
girl don’t you? don’t you?” (which is taken up again by Kelly, in slightly similar terms,
on page 58).
-page 73, page 119, page 143: Kelly’s grandfather’s voice.
-page 75: The Senator’s voice imagined by Kelly, using words she wishes him to
use “Don’t doubt me, Kelly. Never” and page 123 “KELLY? KELLY? COME TO ME.”
The Senator’s voice is heard again on page 82 speaking to Buffy’s guests; on page 83
mispronouncing and repeating Kelly’s first name, on page 117 talking to Kelly about
his wife, and especially on page 147, talking to his lawyer on the phone.
-page 80: the contemptuous voices of politicians, like The Senator, towards
volunteer women: “What’s a volunteer? Someone who knows she can’t sell it”
-pages 95 & 96: the voices of Kelly’s friends, then on page 95 the voice of an
unknown woman, Jane Freiberg, overheard by Kelly: “Yes, that’s Kelly Kelleher let
me introduce you she’s so really sweet once you get past the—” The sentence finishes
on a dash representing words Kelly did not want to hear, and something negative
about the character that the readers are not allowed to know.
-page 96: an extract from Kelly’s article on capital punishment, strikingly
interrupting the narrator’s description of Kelly’s entrapment. This passage draws a
tragic parallel between her situation and that of prisoners sentenced to death and
brutally killed.
-page 97: the anonymous voices of rescuers imagined by Kelly: “We’ll get there
Kelly. And we’ll get there on time,” which is also repeated on page 102 “Kelly, Kelly!”
-page 115: Buffy’s voice “why leave now,” page 125 “his shoe”
 18

-in section 30: the extracts from Kelly’s article are interspersed with comments
in italics by supporters of the death penalty, creating an ironic contrast with the
graphic descriptions of the different methods used to kill criminals.
-page 133: Ray Annick (The Senator’s lawyer friend)’s voice—rude words on
the phone overheard by Kelly, then on page 147, his advice to The Senator.
-page 145: Henry Adams quoted by the narrator “the systematic organization
of hatreds.”
On other occasions, italicized words only represent emphasis (27, 38, 41, 103,
104, 108, 114, etc.). However, typographic fragmentation goes hand in hand with
narrative fragmentation, the narrator mostly adopting Kelly’s viewpoint and, very
occasionally, other characters’ viewpoints—in other words, Kelly is the major
focalizer in the book, as said earlier. On page 38, however, “suicidal tendencies” in
italics belongs to a passage focalized by Kelly’s friends, Buffy, Jane and Stacey. The
passage is between brackets as is another passage (on page 41), in which the narrative
adopts the conservative Ham Hunt’s viewpoint on abortion. In both cases, therefore,
narrative fragmentation is underlined by typographic variation. Yet, in some
passages, it is difficult to identify whose viewpoint, if any, is involved—at the bottom
of page 31, for example:

Strictly speaking, The Senator was not lost at the time of the accident: he was
headed in the right direction for Brockden’s Landing, though, unknowingly, he
had taken a road never used any longer since a new, paved Ferry Road existed,
and the turn of this road was three-quarter of a mile beyond the turn for the
old./ At about the time he’d finished his drink, and Kelly Kelleher gave him the
one she’d been carrying for him: for the road.

These two sentences illustrate what Genette calls “zero focalization” (This type of
focalization denotes that the narrator knows more than the character and says more
than the character knows ≠ In external focalization, the narrator tells less than the
character knows. This type of narrator who is outside the characters’ consciousness
allows the readers to draw their own conclusions without the interpretation of the
narrator.) While Kelly thought the driver was lost (page 17 “Lost”, page 18 “‘I think
we’re lost, Senator’”), the omniscient narrator merely sets the record straight thus
showing that he alone can tell the truth—and this is emphasized both by “strictly
 19

speaking” at the beginning of the passage and later by the adverb “unknowingly.”
However, narrative confusion prevails again on page 32: the beginning of the
paragraph (“There were new acquaintances…”) seems to be an allusion to the party
and the guests at Buffy’s as they were perceived by Kelly (return to internal
focalization)—“his eyes, your eyes” suggesting her meeting with the Senator on that
occasion once again. However, not only does the paragraph consist of one lengthy
sentence but, from “there’s the flawlessly beautiful woman…” down to the bottom of
the page, it turns into the evocation of a commercial for a famous Saint-Laurent
perfume named Opium. The passage, therefore, exhibits a process of derealization,
the evocation of the party gradually turning into—or being replaced by—the fiction of
a perfume commercial—and this is all the more ironic as the adverb “really” is
repeated three times. On the other hand, this fiction of a perfectly beautiful woman
addicted to and creating addiction through her perfume also refers to Kelly’s dream of
beauty and romance, as suggested by the word “dream-suggestion.” The end of the
passage adds to the confusion between dream and reality since “these” in “these
stores”—suggesting here and now—has no referent and the sentence significantly
ends on suspension marks. The next paragraph beginning with “and” confirms this
interpretation as it returns to internal focalization to deal with a romantic moment
experienced by Kelly with The Senator on the beach.
Syntactic fragmentation has not been analyzed yet, even if the previous
remarks have already introduced the question while the study of the very first section
of the book offers a perfect illustration—a long one-sentence descriptive paragraph is
followed by a couple of short questions separated by a dash. Oates constantly
juxtaposes longer and shorter paragraphs, longer and shorter sentences so that her
syntax also illustrates the fragmentation characteristic of the novella. The passage
referring to Kelly’s eye defect on pages 21 and 22, in section 8, can clarify Oates’s
approach. It consists of 4 paragraphs: the first is short, broken and elliptic with a
couple of verbless sentences in the middle, possibly suggesting Kelly’s eye weakness.
The second is more classical as it refers to and represents Kelly’s recovery of normal
eyesight. But the next paragraph is not only far longer (31 lines against hardly 7 and 4
for the first two) but consists of two long sentences—5 lines for the first, explaining
Kelly’s “defect,” and 26 for the second, which somehow plunges the reader into a state
of confusion and disarray comparable to Kelly’s disturbed eyesight during the first
two years of her life. This confusion is enhanced by the use of an 11-line comment—
 20

interrupted by a dash and a colon—between brackets focusing on her parents’ anxious

reaction and separating the main clause “it seemed” from the subordinate clause
“that Kelly was…” as if to suggest the distance between reality and Kelly’s perception
of it. As to paragraph 4, it is 26 lines long but comprises one single sentence: here, it
is no longer Kelly’s confused eyesight that is represented but, first, the confused
reactions of one doctor after another (at the bottom of page 22) and then (at the top
of page 23), the confusion experienced as a consequence by Kelly’s father. This
passage includes not only a couple of exclamatory phrases—or ecphoneses—“and
what irony”/“what irony” (repeated 3 times), but also a speech particle “yes” and
interjections “boom, boom, boom.” In other words, the sentence evolves from a third
to a first person narrative with Artie Kelleher first as focalizer and then as speaker—
hence the evolution of the text from narrative to direct speech—through the dramatic
interruption of a dash. In addition, the passage includes a double image, or more
specifically, an image within an image: “throwing his arms open wide as if to invite,
[as in a TV program the talk-show host so invites], an audience of anonymous
millions to share in his bemusement.” This image within an image is worthy of
attention—not only does it refer to television, that is, performance and appearance,
but it somehow reproduces the narrative strategy—the first person emerging from or
concealed in the third. The text, therefore, reproduces Artie Kelleher’s mixed feelings
and ambivalent reaction. While he is concerned about his daughter, he is also—maybe
especially—baffled by his own lack of control and powerlessness. No matter how
successful he may be professionally, he cannot influence his private life.
This complex, highly dramatic, narrative and syntactic strategy is recurrent in
the whole book—by alternating, or simply juxtaposing, longer and shorter
paragraphs, sentences and sections, not only does Oates weave a chaotic, disturbing
narrative but she uses language mimetically to exhibit the “multi-layered reality”
mentioned by Tromble. Thus, the readers’ involvement is indispensable—not only are
they turned into voyeurs, as said earlier, but they are required to see through a
complex narrative in order to catch a “glimpse” of the complex reality experienced by
Kelly. While fragmentation—be it narrative, typographic or syntactic—usually
disturbs and undermines representation, in Black Water, by contrast, it is associated
with repetition and turned into a strategy of representation, as if only such a
disjointed, repetitive narrative could give the reader an idea of what Kelly is going
 21

through while she is trapped in a car filling up with black water during the short
period between the accident and her death.

6. Repetition: entrapment and revelation

Throughout the novella, there are two major types of repetition—narrative
repetition, that is, the repetition of scenes, and lexical repetition, namely the
repetition of words and phrases:
-as far as lexical repetition is concerned, anaphora and accumulation are
among the most recurrent figures of speech in the narrative. On page 9, for instance,
the anaphora “you would expect,” “you would expect,” “you would not expect,” is
followed by an accumulation of adverbs: “so suddenly, so rudely, so helplessly.” As
figures of repetition generally add emphasis, in the book they underline Kelly’s tragic
predicament, how she is literally submerged, overwhelmed by all sorts of emotions,
including terror and panic, hope, disgust and despair. Lexical repetitions definitely
dramatize all these emotions.
On page 18, however, the anaphoric repetition of “Just before the car flew off
the road Kelly Kelleher…” goes beyond mere emphasis—it suggests an attempt on the
part of the author to reconstruct or imagine the traumatic, elusive moment when “the
car flew off the road.” This repetition, as is often the case in the novella, betrays both
Oates’s desire to represent Kelly’s experience, and her acknowledgement that
symbolic reconstructions never bridge the gap entirely between experience and its
representation. In other words, Oates expresses both a desire for representation and
an acknowledgement of the limits of representation. On pages 5 and 6, the repetition
of “suddenly” confirms this interpretation—“and then, suddenly, as in a film when
spasms like hiccups begin and the picture flies out of the frame, so suddenly, she
would never comprehend how suddenly, the road flew off from beneath the rushing
car…”—all the more as, before the second repetition, an image/comparison is used in
another failed attempt to grasp the elusive moment when Kelly’s life was turned
upside down. The repetition of the same adverb, therefore, adds emphasis while
suggesting the limits of language and representation.
However, the most striking repetition in the novella is no doubt the
eponymous “black water,” a nearly oxymoronic phrase, as it spills inexorably into the
 22

car, “devour[ing] Kelly”—this image is used on page 6. It is mentioned on pages: 3, 6,

27, 35, 44, 47, 63, 64, 75, 80, 89, 93, 95, 98, 103, 109, 110, 120, 124, 138, 148, 151, 152,
153, 154—sometimes, several times on the same page (75), sometimes with a slight
variation as on page 144 “filthy water.” While it is repeated 8 times in the first part of
the book—that is in the first 15 sections—it recurs 17 times in the second, since the
water is increasingly invading the car, thereby becoming more and more threatening
and frightening. The phrase literally haunts the whole novella, thus creating a tragic
sense of entrapment—which links up with the second type of repetition, that is,
narrative repetition all the more as, in the last fifty pages of the book, the phrase
“black water” is included in the short sentence “As the black water filled her lungs
and she died,” which is repeated 6 times (103, 109, 120, 138, 148, 154) and concludes
the novel—“black water,” therefore, refers to both lexical and narrative repetitions.
While the sentence dramatizes Kelly’s coming death, thereby underlining its
ineluctability, it is also an attempt to grasp the elusive, unknowable moment when
life stops and death prevails. Lexical repetition, therefore, plays a key dramatic role
and adds to the tragic dimension of the book, but it also has a metatextual dimension.
Remember the quotation from Oates’s essay, “Why is Your Writing so Violent:”
“writing is language and, in a very important sense is more ‘about’ language than
‘about’ a subject.” In fact, the whole novella is also about Oates’s attempt to grasp the
unique instant, the split second when life turns into death.
On other occasions, lexical repetitions disclose and emphasize Kelly’s self-
delusion: for instance, in the early sections, when she insists on her friendly
conversation with The Senator: “they had been talking companionably together, and
they had been laughing easily together, like old friends, like the most casual of old
friends” (5). The repetitions here are symptomatic of Kelly’s romantic illusions,
especially after the evocation of the condom in the previous paragraph, but also of her
desire to convince herself that she is right, that what she believes is true.

-Concerning narrative repetition, it concerns the recurrence of several major

scenes throughout the novella—the car drive, the accident, the party and Kelly’s
meeting with The Senator. These repetitions create a powerful sense of stasis (as in
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, for instance) and entrapment, since the scenes keep
lapping in repetitive waves like the water into the vehicle. However, each time they
return, they bring new insights, and as they become more jumbled, paradoxically they
 23

create more meaningful connections. I will not insist on the repeated allusions to
Kelly’s horoscope (13, 14, 17, 54, 56), I will return to it later. The recurrent evocation
of the accident and the horoscope confirms the topical fragmentation of the novel:
both casual details and tragic events are juxtaposed and similarly recurrent. More
important, while certain moments are repeated and thus dwelt on, the repetitions of
scenes are never perfect but approximate, and there are always minor differences
from one version to another so that a narrative trajectory emerges.
Regarding the accident, it is briefly described in the first section (p 3) that
represents a sort of mise en abyme of the narrative that follows, considering that the
same scene is endlessly repeated. In this opening section, the stress is on the car as it
is the subject of the verbs: “the rented Toyota was speeding… the car had gone of the
road and had overturned, listing its passengers…”: in this first version, therefore, the
passengers are acted upon by the machine, they appear as mere victims. In the
second version, at the end of section 2, it is the road that is responsible since it is now
the subject of the verbs: “the road flew out from beneath the rushing car…” The
passengers are more active but now it is the water that “devour[s]” them, as said
earlier. In the third version, on page 11, the car is mentioned again but a couple of
new details are added, the guardrail and The Senator’s interjection “Hey!”. It is as if
Kelly’s memories were getting clearer and clearer after the initial shock. Similarly,
when she remembers the car drive and the moment before the accident—another
recurrent episode in the narrative—she first mentions alcohol (p 5), then not just
alcohol (p 15) but also what she calls The Senator’s “aggressive” driving (p 16), which
is confirmed by the vivid description on the following page: “the man beside her
braked the car, accelerated, braked, braked harder and accelerated harder” (17).
While the sound effects illustrate the aggressiveness of the driver, the lexical
repetition of verbs and adverb, and the chiasmus construction (ABBA) underline
Kelly’s entrapment in the car, that is, her powerlessness and the driver’s
responsibility this time—interestingly he is not called “The Senator” in the sentence
but “the man,” a sign of distance on the part of Kelly but not of full awareness or
acceptance of the truth yet. In section 10 (34-35), we have another account of the
accident stressing the car speed. The 5th version is given in section 15 in what seems to
be the first fully developed account over a lengthy, breathless, two-page sentence. But
here again a major detail is added, while “the car skidded into a guardrail” (63), “The
Senator shoved her away” (64) and left her trapped in the car. From then on, The
 24

Senator’s responsibility is clearly established. However, it is only in the 6 th version, on

p 76, that the horror of his attitude is revealed. This time, neither the car nor the road
are mentioned, only The Senator’s behavior: “he’d been desperate to get free using
her very body to lever himself out the door overhead.” It is not just that he “shoved
her away” but that he used her body “to lever himself” and get out of the car. In other
words, he did not hesitate to sacrifice her in order to rescue himself. The truth,
therefore, is uncovered gradually, repetition after repetition, as if Kelly were
remembering progressively—first she recalls fragments (hence the short first
versions) and then, fragment after fragment, she gets the full picture back. The
repetition of the accident scene, therefore, results in uncovering The Senator’s
responsibility, at least to the readers, considering Kelly’s self-delusion. In the last
section, on pages 143 (“he had not abandoned her”) and 144, she still refuses to admit
the truth, as emphasized by the anaphoric repetition of “he had not”: “He had not
kicked her, he had not fled from her. He had not forgotten her.”
In the second part of the novella, the accident scene disappears and it is
replaced by repeated evocations of Kelly’s entrapment in the car while the black water
is flowing in—this is the moment when narrative and lexical repetitions get mixed (as
said earlier). However, Kelly’s entrapment is also mentioned once in the first part—in
section 13 (46-47). But in the second part, it recurs like a tragic leitmotiv obsessively
imprisoning both character and reader. It is briefly mentioned at the beginning of
section 16 (69), then in section 19 more details are given about Kelly’s injuries (a
cracked bone, broken ribs, etc.): one long sentence on page 75, another on page 76. In
section 20, only the black water is briefly mentioned (80), a longer evocation is to be
found in section 22 (88-89), in section 23 (92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99), in section 25
(102, 103, 109—the very last words on the page), in section 26 (110), section 27 (114),
section 29 (123-124), section 31 (138 “the black water”), and most dramatically in the
last pages of the last section only the black water is mentioned (151, 152, 154), thus
emphasizing the emergency situation and prefiguring Kelly’s death.
Throughout the book, memories of the accident are closely interwoven with
memories of another key episode, Kelly’s meeting with The Senator—often associated
with the party at Buffy’s—which keeps recurring in the narrative, even if it is first
evoked after the accident and haunted by the knowledge of what will—and indeed
already has—happened: “SHE WAS THE GIRL, SHE WAS THE ONE HE’D CHOSEN,
she was the one to whom it would happen, the passenger in the rented Toyota” (44).
 25

As for the accident scene, new insights are gradually added so that Kelly’s
involvement with The Senator evolves from suspicion (page 36, beginning of section
10) to blind attraction until, repetition after repetition, more jarring memories
emerge gradually uncovering The Senator’s ambiguous personality. The meeting
scene is first mentioned in section 9 on page 27, in strikingly elliptic, journalistic style
—hence a couple of verbless sentences—as if the narrator were borrowing from a
newspaper article contextualizing the accident after the facts. The meeting is fully
related again in section 11, but this time from Kelly’s point of view (36-37),
emphasizing her romantic illusions by contrast. It is mentioned again in section 13,
section 14, and section 17. In section 19 (75), a passage is ambiguous: “In fact he was
comforting her, smiling, frowning concerned and solicitous touching her shoulder
with his fingertips.” It can refer either to the meeting again or to Kelly imagining The
Senator’s behavior after the accident. However, the meeting scene is repeated in
section 20 (82) and one important detail is added: “Actually, the first thing The
Senator did after greeting his hostess was to draw Ray Annick [The Senator’s lawyer
friend] off to confer with him, out of earshot of the others.” But I will not develop this
point now—I will get back to it when I focus on The Senator in the following part of
my analysis.

7. An ominous portrait of the Senator

Throughout the book, Oates draws a dark portrait of “The Senator,” as he is
always referred to, with capital letters. And this phrase is ambiguous: the definite
article suggests that the reader knows who he is (≠ a Senator), yet he is never named,
so that he remains at a distance, like a threatening archetypal figure, representing all
the politicians who did—or can—attract naïve young women and mislead them. Not
to mention the fact that throughout the novella the article too is always capitalized, so
that “The Senator” is less a fully-fledged character than a type. As Tromble writes in
the article already mentioned: “This recourse to character-types is a technique Oates
frequently employs to emphasize the universality of her characters’ experiences and

reactions” (6). The reader, therefore, never gets access to his thoughts or feelings but
he is always portrayed from Kelly’s viewpoint, through Kelly’s blindly attracted eyes—
with the exception of the last section where his viewpoint suddenly emerges in the
middle of page 144, in a strange, ambiguous passage. While the first words of the
paragraph “…had not abandoned her” are still focalized by Kelly, the focalization
 26

changes immediately afterwards and The Senator’s viewpoint suddenly prevails—“the

filthy water which no power on earth could induce him to return,” “he could not have
said,” etc.—thus emphasizing the gap between the two characters. After the evocation
of his escape, the passage continues with a series of questions disclosing his fear for
himself and his political career (145) until his phone call to Ray Annick (147-148).
The first and only time he is allowed to speak in the first person, he lies both about
his identity and about the accident. Not only is his version shorter than Kelly’s but in
his version the roles are strikingly reversed: “the girl was drunk, and she got
emotional, she grabbed at the wheel and the car swerved off the road and they’ll say
manslaughter, they’ll get me for—” (147, bottom of the page). He puts the blame on
her, thereby suggesting that he is—or will be—the victim. The whole passage creates a
dramatic break in the narrative that is underlined on the next page by the omniscient
narrator’s brutal return: “But none of this Kelly Kelleher knew or could know” (148).
In other words, while the novella suggests a Greek tragedy with Kelly as a tragic
heroine, her romantic illusions as her tragic flaw or hamartia, and the car drive as
her mistake, she does not achieve recognition or revelation (anagnorisis)—only the
readers do, while she is sacrificed.
The Senator is portrayed gradually by means of repeated allusions to the
meeting and to Buffy’s party based on Kelly’s memories. This strategy shows the
development of Kelly’s involvement with him and her changing attitude towards him
(37 “Kelly certainly revised her opinion”). Initially she is politically suspicious (36)
but becomes powerfully attracted (top of page 37). Like the accident scene, the
meeting is obsessively dwelt on but it re-emerges with added insight. The repeated
evocations of The Senator’s “aggressive driving” in the opening sections, however,
cast a dark shadow over the character—even if it is merely perceived as exciting by
Kelly (“what she felt was excitement: that adrenaline-charge” [17]). In the eyes of the
readers, he is immediately seen as threatening—all the more as Oates deals with a
real event, the result of which is known to the readers. The portrait of The Senator,
therefore, is built on an ironic gap between Kelly’s blindness and tragic ignorance,
and the readers’ growing awareness. Kelly first remembers The Senator as strong and
attractive: “her small-boned hand so vigorously shaken in his big gregarious hand”
(13), “how tall he was, how physical his presence” (20), which is repeated on pages
38-39, where the portrait becomes even more laudatory—as evidenced by words like
“charismatic,” “a former athlete,” etc. This physical portrait is followed by a no less
 27

laudatory political portrait on page 61. But Kelly’s memories gradually evolve in the
second part of the book—hence the revelation of his attitude in the car in section 16—
and a series of minor but significant changes are perceptible. Kelly recalls that the
first person he talked to at the party was his lawyer friend “out of earshot of the
others” (82)—which suggests that, no matter how friendly he may be, The Senator
remains a politician with dirty little secrets. This is confirmed in the last section as
Annick is the first person he calls to save himself—there is a striking parallel between
the two scenes, the first prefiguring the second. Then, still in section 20, Kelly
remembers “a bristle of steely-gray hairs” in “the shallow V of the collar” (82). For the
first time she perceives The Senator as an older man, which is confirmed in section 22
—“an exhausted middle-aged man beginning to grow soft in the gut, steely-gray curly
hair thinning at the crown of his head . . .” (90). This degradation is confirmed in
section 25 when he and Ray Annick eventually lose the tennis game to the younger
men and Kelly mentions “his uncle’s face” (104-105); then in section 27 (115-116), the
blue eyes of the opening portrait (20) are still there but the lids are “somewhat puffy,
the large staring eyeballs threaded with blood.” The evolution of Kelly’s memories
suggests a panoramic view gradually turning into a close-up—the closer the movie
camera, the more visible the flaws. The physical deterioration is further confirmed by
The Senator’s heavy sweat and rumpled clothes at the bottom of page 116. By the end
of the novel two ominous memories have surfaced—Kelly’s friend Buffy saying to her
as she leaves with the Senator for the fateful car ride: “‘Don’t forget, he voted to give
aid to the Contras’” (end of section 28, 122), and, in section 31, as Kelly passes
through the party kitchen, Ray Annick on the phone:

. . . speaking in a low, angry voice, the words asshole, fuck, fucking punctuating

his customarily fastidious speech. . . so unlike the genial smiling man
romantically attentive to Buffy St John all that day, so unlike the man courteous
and sweetly attentive to Kelly Kelleher. . . his  eyes. . . followed her as she
passed. . . as a cat’s eyes follow movement with an instinctive impersonal
predatory interest; yet as soon as she passed beyond his immediate field of
vision he ceased to see her, ceased to register her existence.” (133-134)

Though merely a lawyer, Annick belongs in the same fake political world as The
Senator (see the passage on The Senator’s photographs on page 126) and his attitude
 28

prefigures the terrible end—in order to save The Senator from scandal and damage to
his political career, Annick will try to help The Senator to dissociate from the accident
so that Kelly will be left in the car to die.
For the reader, however, a number of details in Kelly’s evocations of The
Senator are strangely ambiguous, if not ominous:
-his blue eyes: “the blue of washed glass” (20) is a significant image as it
combines a very pale color, nearly the white of death, and a hard substance; but later
the evocation becomes “the irises startlingly blue. Like colored glass with nothing
behind it” (58), which suggests both harshness and an absence of depth, a mere
facade;
-his jaw and his teeth, which are repeatedly mentioned (30, 39, 98, 140), like
his tongue when he kisses Kelly. The tongue is a leitmotiv in the narrative, a
significant synecdoche conveying the sense of deadly voracity: “the forceful probing
tongue” (55), “that tongue thick enough to choke you” (61); “Penetrated her dry,
alarmed mouth with his enormous tongue” (77), “his fat thrusting tongue, the hunger
in it” (124);
-his domineering and selfish attitude: “The Senator was in the habit of making
queries that were in fact statements” (31); “how assured his fingers gripping her bare
shoulders” (33); speaking to her “as if speaking to a very young child or to a drunken
young woman, slowly” (62); insulting her by telling her she is “too young to
understand, maybe” (91); “a masculine proprietary look” (142);
-he mispronounces her name (37, 83, 101), asks her twice whether she has a
boyfriend (116), takes no heed when she says “Here’s our turn” (31), which suggests
that he hardly pays attention to what she is telling him or whom she is;
-his political canniness (106);
-the self-regard revealed in the curiously repulsive image of the Senator eating
“ravenously, yet fastidiously, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin after every bite”
(138) and the resulting “catsup on his napkin like smears of lipstick” (139, “catsup”
being similar to ketchup) with its inevitable connotations of blood.
All these details—and there are probably others—are actually signs, if not
omens, of the threat on Kelly’s life as soon as she meets The Senator. But she does not
see, let alone decipher, them. They are intended for the readers, as prefiguration of
her tragic fate and create a powerful sense of doom. Oates, therefore, uses dramatic
irony—the reader knows Kelly is bound to die but she does not—throughout the book,
 29

which creates a special bond between narrator and reader, in order to underline
Kelly’s romantic illusions, the gap between reality, on the one hand, and her idealistic
expectations and perceptions of reality, on the other.

8. Kelly Kelleher, “an American girl”

By piecing together different fragments from the narrative, the reader manages
to get a fairly clear image of whom Kelly Kelleher is: a “slender” (50) 26-year old
idealistic young woman with “pebble-colored eyes” (21), born between October 23
and November 21 1964, an only child visibly close to her parents—no mention of any
siblings—in spite of political disagreements, a formerly brilliant student now working
as a journalist, with skin problems, a significant eye defect in her early years, a
passion for liberal politics and social commitment (79-80), a history of eating
disorders (51) and a painful, destructive love affair she is reluctant to talk about (38).
She is intelligent though rather shy and discreet, compared to her friend Buffy (27-
28), less experienced and self-confident as well. So Kelly Kelleher appears to be a full-
fledged character in the novella, even if her voice throughout is the voice of “a dead
woman,” as Tanya Horeck writes in an article entitled “Lost Girls: The Fiction of
Joyce Carol Oates.”
However, Black Water bears a special dedication, “For the Kellys”—
unfortunately it does not appear in this particular edition of the novel—which
highlights Joyce Carol Oates’s purpose. It suggests the allegorical dimension of the
character. For Horeck, “Oates’s writing captures the woman’s desperate and false
hope that The Senator will save her, and explores her psychic investment in the
myths of American culture” (27). Kelly Kelleher embodies the good American girl:
“She was an American girl you want to look your best and give your ALL” (52). The
narrative shift in the sentence (from the third to the second person) and the
typographic variations (from normal font to italics + the emphatic capitalization)
show that Oates both portrays and addresses all American girls. In an interview she
explains: “I wanted the story to be somewhat mythical, the almost archetypal
experience of a young woman who trusts an older man and whose trust is violated”
(quoted in Horeck 27). Hence the decision not to name the man directly; he is “The
Senator” while Kelly is the archetypal American girl.
 30

In Black Water, as in Blonde, the terrible outcome of the story is known in

advance and Oates is trying to capture a particular moment in time, the moment
before death happens, as it is inevitably going to happen and has in fact already
happened. Therefore, she establishes a connection between femininity and death.
Thus, in Blonde, she writes: “there is something female about being dead” (210).
Existing within this space between life and death, Kelly Kelleher looks back over
events, both from her recent adulthood and from her childhood in a way that enables
Oates to reveal the damaging nature, and incredible power, of certain myths of
femininity and masculinity. Kelly has imbibed the dominant ideals of femininity that
circulate in American consumer culture. In chapter 13, for instance, the description of
her clothes at Buffy’s party suggests a couple of adverts mimicking the language of
women’s magazines: “White spandex (= élasthanne) with tiny pearl buttons for that
lingerie look. […] Daffodil yellow cotton mesh tunic to be worn all summer with
chiffon, jeans, swimwear: smart, versatile, and SEXY” (86). As for the horoscope, it
shows how young women are interpellated into romantic discourse: “Scorpio for the
month of July, she, Buffy and Stacey had read giggling in the new Glamour the night
before: Too much caution in revealing your impulses and desires to others! For once
demand YOUR wishes and get YOUR own way! Your stars are wildly romantic
now; Scorpio, after a period of disappointment—Go FOR IT!” (13). The optimistic
tone of the horoscope and the way in which it promises rewards, is emblematic of
how patriarchal society can dupe young women into thinking they are in control even
as they are being manipulated. Another refrain from the book—“You’re an American
girl you love your life. You love your life, you believe you have chosen it” (149)—
further underscores the irony of a discourse of free choice. Part of the inexorableness
of what happens to Kelly is shown to derive from the force of inscribed gender roles.
When Kelly explains to her friend why she is leaving the party early, for instance, she
is forced to acknowledge to herself that it is because “if I don’t do as he asks there
won’t be any later. You know that” (7). In other words, the older powerful man has
authority and power while Kelly follows an assigned gender script. Thus, as they are
driving in the car, Kelly—a name derived ironically from a Celtic word meaning “the
fighter”—hesitates to say they are lost “for fear of annoying The Senator” (60).
Instead she ignores her anxiety, “thinking, though they were lost, though they would
not make the 8:20 PM ferry after all, she was privileged to be here and no harm could
come to her like a young princess in a fairy tale…” (60). Black Water, like many
 31

Oatesian works, shows how young women are betrayed by the mythology of
heterosexual love and romance. Even at the point of death, Kelly holds on to the
belief that The Senator will come back to save her: “he has gone to get help of course”
(74). She clings to the notion of the “good girl,” so central to the constitution of her
female identity: “Why had she hesitated to say they were lost, why hadn’t she told him
to turn the car around, to reverse their course, Oh please!—but she had not dared to
offend him./The black water was her fault, she knew. You just don’t want to offend
them. Even the nice ones” (98), which is repeated on page 99: “Still she had hesitated
not wanting to utter aloud the word lost, had her own mother not warned her no man
will tolerate being made a fool of by any woman no matter how truthfully she speaks
no matter how he loves her.” While the shift from the third to the second person in
the first passage underlines that Oates does not merely refer to Kelly Kelleher but to
all the other Kellys her book is dedicated to, the second points out that the same
noxious principles are transmitted from mothers to daughters indefinitely. The
poignancy of Oates’s writing comes from her powerful descriptions of the bind in
which young women can find themselves. Betrayed by the inculcated myths of
feminine behavior, Kelly is irresistibly drawn to a situation of romantic and sexual
danger despite her better judgment.
Some feminists have blamed Oates for the apparent complicity and
passiveness of her female characters. It is true that sexualized violence is an
archetypal experience in the works of Oates. But it is thematized and explored so as to
work through—that is, come to terms with—a set of masculine and feminine roles and
relationships in culture. Underlying her work is a drive to expose the naturalized
myths of femininity and masculinity that fuel a culture of violence. Henry Gates puts
it bluntly: Oates is a troubling figure for “normative feminists” because “it is not her
ambition to add to our supply of positive role models;” instead she “insists on
exploring the structure of female masochism” (5). But her work is exceptionally
negative because it is often based on real crime stories, in which any attempt to
“liberate” themselves on the part of her female characters takes place only in the most
straitened circumstances, often at the moment of death. For example, while Kelly
puts up a fight to survive, the readers know in advance it is a fight she does not—and
cannot—win: “As the black water rose about her, to fill her lungs” (89). However, the
greatest manifestation of Kelly’s strength and power comes at the moment of her
death: “Absurd pink-polished nails, now broken, torn. But she would fight. A blood-
 32

flecked froth in her nostrils, her eyes rolling back in her head but she would fight”
(144). And later again: “She was drowning, but she was not going to drown. She was
strong, she meant to put up a damned good fight” (149). These passages are all the
more forceful as they literally bracket another passage in which The Senator
confesses to his cowardliness (144-147)—the only moment in the book in which he is
the focalizer, then the speaker. Oates, therefore, does not simply assert the negativity
of female desire, she exposes it in order to alert her readers. “While some appear to
view the Oatsian focus on narratives of […] violence as a perpetuation of them,”
Horeck argues “that the political significance of her work, and its value for feminism,
comes from her rehearsal of archetypal stories that turn on this temporal structure of
‘before and after’” (35). She adds that “the critical import of [Oates’s work] lies in its
devastating critical inventory of the psychic and social structures that work to
produce the inexorable nature of violence against women” (Horeck 35). For instance,
in Black Water, Oates castigates the myths of romance, as confirmed in the last pages
when Kelly recalls leaning forward to kiss The Senator, “for she was the one, she and
none other, supplanting all the others, the young women who would have taken that
kiss, from him…” (152). Still imagining she will be saved from the submerged car, she
focuses on the moon in the sky, thinking: “If I can see it, I am still alive and that
simple realization filled her with a great serene happiness” (153). The repeated
allusions to the moon, a traditional symbol of romantic love, confirm this
interpretation since the moon in the book is “pale” and “flat as a coin” (17).
There is another reason, however, for the so-called “negativity” of Oates’s
character. Not only is Kelly’s story derived from a real episode, as said earlier, but she
takes on tragic dimensions and achieves a kind of tragic dignity. In his treatise
Poetics, Aristotle defines the tragic hero as “a man who is not eminently good and
just, yet whose misfortune is not brought by vice or depravity but by some error or
frailty.”  Thus, the ideal tragic hero must be an intermediate kind of a person—neither
too virtuous nor too wicked. His misfortune excites pity because it is out of all
proportion to his error of judgment, and his over all goodness excites fear for his
doom.” In Black Water, even if the spectacle is provided by an incident coming from
the tabloids and television and Kelly Kelleher is an American girl like any other, yet
her romantic illusions and her blindness represent her tragic flaw. It is owing to this
flaw that she meets her doom through the workings of Fate or Nemesis, that is, The
 33

Senator. The only difference between Oates’s novel and a Greek tragedy is that Kelly
does not achieve recognition or anagnorisis—she remains a blind victim to the end.

However, the tragedy that befalls her does not result from her passivity, let
alone masochism, what Oates suggests is that it is society that colludes in Kelly’s
victimization. She also questions the type of world that gives rise to such individuals
as The Senator. Especially, as Horeck puts it, Oates tries to seize “the moment in time
[…] the moment in which the catastrophe, that we know with unerring certainty and
dread will happen, has not happened yet. It is a lost moment, one that exists in an
uncanny liminal space between life and death, reality and imagination. This is the
reason why some critics refer to Oates’s novels Black Water and Blonde as
illustrations of her “aesthetics of the aftermath” (Horeck 26).